Twitch cleans house by removing copyrighted audio and archived video

We are all still waiting for Google and Twitch to make an official merger announcement, though there seems to be no shortage of “sources familiar with the matter” who know it is going to happen any day now. While we wait, it looks like Twitch is making some serious changes to the content stored on its servers.

If you are streaming your next gaming session online for friends and fans to watch, there’s a good chance you are using Twitch. Aside from being a free service, Twitch is available everywhere. Sony and Microsoft have included support for the service in their next-gen consoles, and third party hardware for everything else out there is less than $150.

When it was rumored that Google would purchase Twitch to increase the size of their streaming empire, few people were surprised. Twitch is by far the largest game streaming service right now, and it grew so rapidly in popularity mostly because Google refused to offer a reasonably comparable service at the time.

Now that Twitch is all grown up, and everyone is starting to recognize this service as a major player in the industry, the company has to make some hard decisions. It’s not easy to be a small company with a popular product that is essentially operating at a loss, but if you add in takedown notices and legal threats from the music recording industry you can see where things could get ugly quickly for Twitch. The company has responded to this realization by working with Audible Magic to scan recorded video and mute anything that sounds like copyrighted material.

On top of this copyright compliance, Twitch is removing archived video sessions that are older than 14 days for regular members and 60 days old for paid members and partners. This doesn’t apply to highlight reels, though there are new restrictions that apply to this category of video as well. Twitch has made it possible to export your archived video, which includes the ability to store your game footage on YouTube, but the service has been under heavy load since these new rules were announced. At one point the export service was shut down entirely while Twitch sorted out how to improve performance.

Whether or not this is Twitch following some sort of agreement with YouTube before the acquisition is made official is anyone’s guess. Twitch is making changes that dramatically decrease storage costs on their end and limit the resources necessary to handle DMCA takedown requests. The bottom line is that even if everyone were to leave Twitch today and go to a competing service, it’s only a matter of time before those services would find themselves faced with the same problems.

Twitch is dealing with the cost of scale and the perils of being in the limelight. While their most hardcore fans may see this as selling out and getting sucked up into the Google mothership, in the long run it means Twitch is going to be able to offer more to the average user.